My Dad had a late model 1982 Beta 1.6 as a company car (his company did a deal with the suppling dealer) it was the first car that I drove after passing my test in a Mk2 Escort.

All I can recall of it was that after the Escort, the steering was really heavy, but did go like stink in a straight line. It was also very luxurious for its day with headrests and an FM stereo radio.....

Checked it on the DVLA, it didn't make its 6th birthday, written off one would assume.

You can always depend on the word 'Lancia' in a thread title to provoke a lot of ill-informed comment from people who have never actually owned one.

Signed: a happy former Lancia owner - and there's lots of us - who was actually around at the time of the short-lived structural rust problem with the Beta saloon and can speak from experience rather than parroting what his friend's mate's brother's father-in-law once read in the Auto Express.

So it's a myth that Lancia UK spent a fortune buying back Beta's that were affected and then dropped the brand from the UK altogether - and it's a myth that the Fiat Group can't use Lancia in the UK because it's a poisoned brand, so they use Chrysler here but Lancia everywhere else ?

Oh Deidre!

Corsa, you can't get mugh rougher than that!

The same thing happened to GM with the Corsa....they wanted to call it something else [or was it the nova?]...unitl it was pointed out that in Spanish it would be something really silly...

The Corsa-A, built in Spain was called the Nova just for the UK, ie Vauxhall - GM Europe then decreed that Opel and Vauxhall would use common names, so Nova became Corsa, Kadett became Astra, Cavalier became Vectra, Carlton became Omega.

"No va" allegedly means "no go" in Spanish.

Edited by RT on 13/10/2013 at 21:54